Voluntary Simplicity | Deep Ecology | Sense of Place
| Globalization and Its Critics | Sustainable Living |
Healthy Children | Global Warming: Changing CO2urse
Healthy Children | Global Warming: Changing CO2urse
Discovering a Sense of Place
An Eight-Session Course for the Workplace, Faith Center, or Home
Purpose:- To understand the meaning of a bioregional perspective, and what it would mean to develop one.
- To consider the benefits of consciously developing an intimate relationship with your place.
- To explore what it might mean to protect the place where you live.
Topics Covered:
- A Sense of Place: Wendell Berry, America's best-known bioregionalist, says if you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. With a sense of place, your identity is defined—to a significant extent—by the natural features of the place where you live. Without a sense of place, what will fill the void?
- Responsibility to Place: There is a difference between living on the land and dwelling in it—understanding its rhythms, its potential, and its limits. Those who develop intimacy with a place over time tend to accept responsibility for it.
- Knowing Your Bioregion: Your bioregion is a unique place with its own watershed, soils, climate, plants, animals, and history. How much do you know about it?
- Living in Place: Living in place means consciously trying to satisfy your needs and find your pleasures in your local bioregion and working to assure the long-term health of the bioregion.
- Mapping Your Place: Mapping can be learned by local groups and individuals to give a new sense of place. Whereas a typical map shows political subdivisions and transportation routes, a bioregionalist's map delineates regions based on watersheds, climate, and plant types, thereby helping people relate to their natural surroundings.
- Building Local Community: A bioregionalist assumes responsibility for the health and continuity of a place, not only its natural features, but also the social bonds of its people.
- Empowerment: Knowing a place can inspire and empower one to take action to preserve it or take part in its restoration. How important is individual and group action in modern society?